Word: cathay
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...less juicy piece of fruit. Puccini's librettists, like Prokofiev, took their story from an 18th Century "fable," i.e., play, of Count Carlo Gozzi, who in turn had been inspired by a Chinese-Persian legend about a beautiful but petulant princess of ancient Cathay. The princess announces she will marry any man of noble blood who can answer three riddles; if he misses an answer, he loses his head...
...night they watched graceful Siamese dance exhibitions or sipped drinks under the fake banana trees of the Silver Palm Club. The more adventurous let fleet-tongued, fleet-footed samlor (pedicab) boys wheel them off to the Cathay Night Club, where they jitterbugged the night away with wriggly Siamese taxi dancers. (Lest the visitors get any improper ideas, signs at their hotels informed them sternly: "It is forbidden to entertain lady guests in the bedroom without permission of the management...
...them. At one busy corner, a Communist noncom stood guard over a lone Nationalist soldier who squatted self-consciously in a doorway. "What about him?" asked a civilian. "He is very happy now," replied the noncom. The soldier, puffing a cigarette, grinned sheepishly. And under the marquee of the Cathay Theater, a lone Communist private, obviously ill at ease in the big city's hurlyburly, served a nervous trick as sentry. Behind him, a gaudily got-up billboard advertised the Cathay's latest feature attraction: I Wonder Who's Kissing...
Shanghai was a city of refugees. Along the Bund and Nanking Road, the best hotels were being taken over by weary retreating troops. In the white-tiled kitchen of the Hotel Cathay the manager argued hopelessly against this intrusion. The soldiers clumped past him in full field equipment, gazed in fascination at the twinkling lights of push-button elevators, and mounted their machine guns in the Tower Room overlooking the Whangpoo River...
Their quarry was a Catalina flying boat of Cathay Pacific Airways which made a regular run between Portuguese Macao and British Hong Kong...